Many types of information and content are now stored digitally, including books, music, movies, software programs, video games, databases, advertisements, as well as other content. Because such content is stored digitally, it can be easily transferred using many types of electronic networks. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,875,110, 4,412,292, 5,848,398, 6,397,189, 6,381,575, 4,674,055, 5,445,295, 5,734,719, 6,286,029, 6,799,165, 6,655,580, 6,330,490, 6,662,080, 6,535,791, 6,711,464, 5,237,157, 6,654,757, 5,794,217, and 6,748,539. Both private and public electronic networks, including the Internet, are frequently used to transfer the digital content.
Often the digital content is transferred electronically, it can be sold to an user who is not located where the digital content was originally stored. The digital content can be sold for a variety of purposes, including education, entertainment, research, or other purposes. The digital content may be sold in any number of technological formats known in the art that permit storage and retrieval of the digital data, including floppy discs, compact discs of several varieties, video discs of several varieties, including digital video discs, magnetic storage devices using a variety of forms and technologies, and solid state devices of several varieties.
Most of the digital content sales have been to users of computers that are connected to each other via networks of various types, e.g., the Internet. But users are not always located at such a computer when they desire to purchase the digital content, or they have a computer but it is not connected to a network. Consequently, sales of digital content have begun using devices in remote locations, including stand-alone devices (such as kiosks) in retail or other high-traffic areas. The remote devices may be attended or unattended. In both of these instances, the owners and operators need to keep such remote devices (and systems) running virtually all of the time and keep them optimized to facilitate user interaction. For this reason, it has become common practice to monitor the remote device and the user's interaction with the remote device.
However, physically monitoring such remote devices—and the systems containing such remote devices—can be costly, difficult, and inefficient. As the number of remote devices and their geographical locations expand, the time and money spent in traveling to such devices increases and can result in increased communication barriers. Consequently, lost opportunity costs and the number of unsatisfied users can also increase. Accordingly, the industry has begun electronically monitoring such remote devices. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,307,354, 6,145,102, 6,223,089, 6,651,190, 6,697,962, 6,757,850, 6,813,733, 6,839,597, 6,895,285, 6,904,458, Re30,037, as well as U.S. Published Patent Application Nos. 2003/0217306, 2003/0229406, 2004/0059782, 2004/0163008, 2004/0225381, and 2005/0097182.
Nevertheless, the ability to electronically monitor remote devices has been limited for several reasons. First, the monitored data is often limited to a small range of information, primarily system diagnostic data (i.e., system operability status) and cryptic messages (i.e., error codes for indicating status), as well as being limited to only certain components of the system can be monitored. Second, the monitored information is frequently restricted to data that the user actually enters into the remote device, and does not include any other data (including that related to the user's non-entered physical actions during the interaction with device). Third, remote devices are often limited in the content they provide (or only have static content), inherently limiting the information about the user and/or the user's activities that can be monitored. And finally, the means for monitoring often depend on the monitored remote device for power and communication, so the monitoring means become disabled when the monitored remote device experiences technical difficulties.